All posts by danBhentschel

All Things Dad, Ramblings

The origin of the stupid rule

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This morning, I was contemplating stupid rules and how they come about. There’s some pretty bizarre laws on record in the state of New York. Here are some that I enjoyed:

  • Slippers are not to be worn after 10:00 P.M.
  • A person may not walk around on Sundays with an ice cream cone in his/her pocket.
  • While riding in an elevator, one must talk to no one, and fold his hands while looking toward the door.
  • A license must be purchased before hanging clothes on a clothesline.

Please note that I made no effort whatsoever to verify that these actually are law. I am well aware that I may be spreading misinformation, and in the likely event that I am, I apologize.

Disclaimer aside, stupid rules actually do exist all over the world. Even in my own house, I have some pretty stupid rules. They all stem from a desire to maintain the kind of order that Marlene and I feel is appropriate and necessary. Here are some interesting examples that I was reminded of while getting ready for work this morning.

Children may not talk while in timeout

On the surface, this may sound good and innocuous. It originates from some very real problems:

  • Loud complaints about the reasons for, or enforcers of, the timeout
  • Verbal play with other children while in timeout
  • Constant pleas to be removed from timeout

However, there are some logistical problems with this rule:

  • What if there is an emergency?
  • What if the child needs to go to the bathroom?

Marlene and I have made the decision that the number and variety of exceptions to this rule are too many, and could pose confusion for a 2 to 5-year-old who is (presumably) trying to comply with the rule. More likely they are trying desperately to find loopholes in the rule.

Regardless, the easiest thing for all involved is to enforce the rule that absolutely no talking of any kind is permitted in timeout. If this strict ruling backfires, for example if a child really does need to go to the bathroom and pees all over the floor, Marlene and I will deal with the fallout. The downside this morning was that Jasmin was not allowed to say “goodbye” to me when I left for work, because she was in timeout and could not talk to me.

Jacob, specifically, is not allowed to anticipate his parents’ desires

Jacob has a real problem with just doing what he thinks is the right thing, regardless of instructions. This is a consistent, repeated, longstanding pattern throughout his life. Couple this with a very strong tendency to misunderstand and misinterpret situations, and it’s a recipe for disaster. Let me tell you authoritatively, disaster happens with distressing regularity.

For this reason, Jacob is reminded again and again, “Do what I told you to do, and not what you think you should be doing.” It’s a very strange message. Do I want my son to grow to be a mindless puppet who blindly follows the direction of authority? Absolutely not. But he must learn obedience before he learns the much more complex topic of when it is right and good to disobey. Here’s a hint kiddo… it’s actually right and good to disobey far less frequently than you seem to think it is. Jacob is still far from mastering the obedience lesson.

The fallout from this rule today? Jacob was helping me pack my lunch for work, and I very specifically cautioned him, “Bring me exactly the foods that I ask you for. I don’t want you to bring me everything in the refrigerator just because you think it might make a good lunch food.” Well, at one point, I sent Jacob to get me tomatoes, and he came back with tomatoes and grapes. His reasoning: “Dad, I assume you want grapes for lunch today too.”

In this instance, he was correct! I had seriously considered having grapes for lunch, and very well might have asked him to get them for me next. So how did I respond? I told Jacob that he was correct, and I did want grapes, but that he specifically disobeyed my instructions, and if it were to happen again in the future, I would not allow him to help me pack my lunch any more.

If any child mentions cows or mooing while singing “Happy Birthday”, that child will not get any birthday cake

This is the rule that got me thinking along these lines today. Jacob was playing “Happy Birthday” as part of his piano practice time, and was singing along with his playing, as he sometimes has a tendency to do. While listening to him, I was reminded of this rule.

For the last few years, the children have enjoyed adding the phrase “Cows go moo!” to the words of the “Happy Birthday” song whenever we sing it at a birthday party. It seems that each time, their ad-libbing gets more and more exaggerated. At the end of last year, at Jacob’s birthday party, the mooing and giggling were so intense that I couldn’t even hear any singing over the cacophony. Hence the rule.

So far, no child has broken this particular rule, despite its stupidity. I guess the consequences are pretty dire indeed.

– danBhentschel

Health

On losing weight (Part 4 – Volumetrics)

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Calories and grams: the building blocks of a slimmer you.

What is volumetrics?

My previous post in this series was about a cell phone app called Noom. Noom builds its program (and its food database) on a concept called volumetrics.

CNN article on volumetrics

Put simply, volumetrics is all about eating food that has a low calorie density so that you will feel satisfied, but will not gain weight. The measure used by Noom is calories per gram, and it’s very easy to calculate. Take a look at the following label:

image

You only need to look at two items in the list to figure out the calorie density of this food: 200 calories per serving, and 172 grams per serving. So, for this food you would divide 200 by 172 and you come up with 1.16 calories per gram. That’s actually quite a good calorie density.

Why do I care?

There’s two numbers here:

  • Grams – The total amount of food you eat. In theory, the higher this number, the more satisfied (or full) you will feel after eating a meal.
  • Calories – The amount of the food that is absorbed by your body. In theory, the higher this number, the more weight you will gain after eating a meal.

It makes sense that you want the grams to be high, so that you feel satisfied, and you want the calories to be low so that you don’t gain weight. It’s that simple.

Now, given that 3600 calories is roughly a pound, and also given that 454 grams is a pound, we can calculate that a density of about 7.9 calories per gram indicates that every single bit of a given food (after you have exceeded your basal metabolic rate) will go directly to your gut. Wegmans brand butter, for example, has 100 calories in a 14g serving, yielding a density of 7.1 calories per gram. That’s pretty close to the worst possible number.

NOTE: This is a major simplification of the topic. There are many other issues that can come into play that will affect how calories relate to weight gain / loss. These factors are taken into account in something called the thermic effect of food. For a very interesting application, see this article on number of calories in a banana. This is a relatively new topic of research, and the contributing factors and implications are not fully understood at this time.

Noom’s color coding system

Noom uses a red / yellow / green system to indicate how likely it is that a particular food will cause you to gain weight. This is largely based on the calorie per gram figure, although other factors are considered as well.

Typically, foods with less than 1.0 calories per gram are considered to be green. Between 1.0 and 3.0 is yellow, and above 3.0 is considered to be red. Considerations such as how long a food takes to digest (keeps you feeling full longer) and how much fat content the food has can also come into play, but the calorie density is the main indicator.

Noom recommends that you try to structure your diet in such a way that about 50% of the calories you consume are in the green category, about 35% are yellow, and about 15% are red. Based on my goal of 1800 calories per day, that means that 900 of those should be from green foods, 600 from yellow, and 300 from red.

Some food examples

Let’s take a look at several examples of calorie density calculations:

Green foods

 CaloriesGramsDensity (cal / g)
Egg whites30570.5
Wheaties100273.7
Quaker instant oatmeal160433.7
Whole wheat mini pitas110482.3
Red grapes901280.7
Watermelon401400.3
Italian blend salad15900.2
Fat free milk902400.4

Yellow foods

 CaloriesGramsDensity (cal / g)
Whole egg70501.4
95% lean ground beef150851.8
Pork chop160851.9
Haddock 1001130.9
Extra virgin olive oil120148.6
Apple juice1102400.5

Red foods

 CaloriesGramsDensity (cal / g)
Bacon80451.8
Turkey bacon45281.6
Pop tart210504.2
80% lean ground beef210852.5
Pretzels100283.6
Potato chips160285.7
Whole milk1502400.6

The color categorizations above are all according to the Noom food database. I’m not sure I completely agree with all of the assigned colors. For example, I would personally consider haddock to be a green food. Noom doesn’t, though.

Some of the anomalies have a very good reason for being categorized the way they are, though. Take whole milk, for example. While its calorie density is well under 1.0, close to half the 150 calories (70 of them) are delivered in the form of fat. Given that this is in a quickly digested liquid form, it makes sense for it to be a red item. Try to “fill up” on milk sometime. Good luck with that.

That’s a lot of food

If you follow Noom’s suggestions and eat 50% of your calories from “green” (very low calorie density) foods, then it will take a lot of food to meet your daily calorie goals. For example, if you were to eat only baby carrots all day, and your daily caloric intake goal is 1800 calories, then you would need to eat almost 5 pounds of baby carrots to get 900 calories (50% of your goal).

This is a silly example, but it illustrates the concept that you need to eat large portions of green foods to provide sufficient nourishment for your body. It can take a very long time to eat such large quantities of food. You wouldn’t be able to easily do it within 3 normal meal times. You would need to be almost continually eating throughout the day.

So plan ahead! What foods will you eat? How much will you eat? How long do you think it will take to eat it all? In the next post, I will discuss the specific changes I have made to my diet.

– danBhentschel

Moral Issues, Musings

The wisdom formula

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I recently read through the story of Solomon in the Bible. Solomon was considered to be a very wise man. I too would like to be a wise man. But what is wisdom?

Wisdom is not intelligence

The dictionary defines intelligence as the ability to learn or understand things or to deal with new or difficult situations. Notice that intelligence is an ability. It is my assertion that intelligence is innate. All people are born with a certain amount of this attribute called intelligence. There is nothing that we can do to gain or increase in intelligence. Our God-given intellect is what we have to work with.

This statement could be considered offensive because intelligence is so highly valued. Some make the mistake of judging the worth of others based on their level of intelligence. So, to state that some people are born more intelligent than others, in the minds of certain individuals, is tantamount to saying that some people are born superior to others. That is not at all my intention, nor do I believe it to be true.

Wisdom is a much more desirable trait than intelligence, and while intelligence is an integral part of the wisdom formula, they are not directly proportional. A more intelligent person is not necessarily wiser, and vice-versa.

Wisdom requires knowledge

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary contains multiple definitions for the word “knowledge”. For the purposes of this article, I will be treating “knowledge” as synonymous with “stored information”.

Unlike intelligence, which is innate, knowledge is gained through experiences. When we are born, we have no knowledge whatsoever. As we experience things in life, our mind stores memories of those experiences. Our memories are the building blocks of our knowledge.

I believe it possible that people may have different capacities for knowledge, but measuring the amount of information stored in a person’s mind is a fruitless effort, and I doubt that any of us uses our mind’s knowledge store to its full potential anyway.

Wisdom relies on understanding

Understanding is the application of intelligence to knowledge. Our minds are incredibly good at discerning patterns in large sets of data. When we apply our intellect to a body of observations about a particular topic, we start to discern patterns, and thus gain a better understanding about that topic. The longer we apply our intellect, the more understanding we gain. The more information we gather, the more understanding we gain.

Understanding is proportional to the magnitude of our intelligence, the length of time we apply that intelligence to a topic, and the amount of information we have gathered on that topic. Hence, with faux mathematics, I propose the following formula:

understanding = intellect x knowledge x time

 Understanding with discernment

No matter how much intellect, knowledge, and time we have, we will never fully understand even a single topic. We live in a complex world where any number of seemingly random factors will affect any topic that we endeavor to understand. Climates fluctuate. Personalities and emotional states change and clash. Devices and machines wear out and break down. Software has bugs. Every day, in myriad ways, the unexpected happens. When it does, our understanding is invalidated to some degree.

Sometimes we are able to navigate this sea of uncertainty with surprising alacrity, seemingly predicting the unpredictable, and modifying our behavior to defy our preconceptions. Perhaps we are able to read the mood in the room. Perhaps we subconsciously notice some minute, but key, detail. We call it luck, intuition, instinct, gut feeling, serendipity.

I call it discernment. I believe that discernment is a God-given gift, and like intelligence, we are each gifted with differing degrees of discernment.

Wisdom is an action

Better, wisdom is borne out in action, or occasionally in deliberate inaction. Wisdom is the application of understanding. It is the decision, through an effort of willpower, to use our understanding to guide our actions in such a way that a desired outcome can be achieved. The action that is taken is seen by others as wisdom when:

  • The action that is taken builds on the actor’s knowledge, gained through past experience.
  • The action that is taken is demonstrably responsible for the resultant outcome.
  • The action that is taken seems logical in retrospect, but was not immediately obvious beforehand.
  • The resultant outcome is unquestionably beneficial to the actor or to others in the actor’s realm of influence.

If no action is taken, then no wisdom is in evidence. Knowing the right thing to do in a situation, but not doing it is the opposite of wisdom. Imparting advice to another is not wisdom, but only a transfer of knowledge. The recipient of the information now has the responsibility to apply their own intelligence and willpower to the information gained, and thus they have the opportunity to act wisely.

Continuing in the tradition of faux mathematics, I propose the following formula for wisdom:

wisdom = ( understanding + discernment ) x willpower

 A wise person

While a single act can be viewed as wisdom, it takes more than one act to be seen as a wise person. A man or woman who portrays the characteristic of wisdom makes wise choices reliably and on a regular basis.

Acquire knowledge. Apply your intellect to gain understanding. Learn of your intuition so that you can discern how to best apply it. Fortify your willpower so that you will be able to act decisively on your understanding. Be wise.

– danBhentschel